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I've commented to the same effect in the past[0], but we grow food for animals. It's not like we have a giant pile of rotting soy/corn, so we might as well have some cattle eat it. We grow a lot more soy/corn than would otherwise be necessary, so that we can grow more cows.

> The methane produced by cows is not going to be significantly more than the equivalent produced by the same amount of plant material left to rot/decompose.

This is also not true, but even in a world where cows don't produce more methane, it's just inaccurate for people to look at the current feed production in America and to say that we'd be producing that much food if we weren't raising an outsized amount of cattle.

Sure, cattle can be raised on otherwise unusable land. But that is just not the direction that factory farming in the US is going.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26056871




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